For this week, I wanted to create some effect lighting snippets, which is a beginning, and hopefully, will develop into a lighting piece in the weeks to come, for the assignment.
There are some configurations. First, size. The laser bed is 12 by 24, so even though buying bulks and cut them into pieces would be making more economic sense, there is limitation. Second, this is my first time using a laser cutter. Thankfully there are tutorials and instructions to follow along, and there are staff at the shop to answer questions. I learned that setting details matter. If the strokes is wrong, it wouldn’t cut. It the stroke color setting is wrong, it won’t cut. If the version of AI is wrong, it wouldn’t cut…. and so on. Third is material planning, how many is needed to do experiment cutting, and how many is needed for the actual cutting, with a budget.
Making trips to Canal street plastic is fairly easy. I went on Friday and Saturday afternoons, luckily there wasn’t too many customers. Compared to what is available on some oversea websites, the pricing at the store isn’t very friendly. But there are many options, and even semi-finished products ranged around $20 to $60, such as colored tubes, squares, cubes, balls…etc. The T&T plastic land is nearby, with about similar pricing, but fewer options somehow. They all offered customized order, but it will take longer. It wouldn’t make much sense to spend more on raw material than what is already finished, cheaper, and available on the market.
I got several plastic and thin 6×12 to do some test runs (white, $2.99 each), and a 6×12 colorless ($3.5) and a pink 6×12 ($3.5).
Even though following the tutorial setting, the thickness of the material and watts made a difference. To make a successful vector cut on 1/8, I did it 4 times on 50-watt. Also, the sketch looks different on the template.
I wish I have more time to do research on acrylic lighting, sketch, and plan for purchasing raw material. After some test runs, here is the result:
